Will JumpCloud Help Usher In The 'DevOps' Era Of IT Transformation?

A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Rajat (Raj) Bhargava, Founder and CEO, JumpCloud...

What do you get when you combine the explosive growth in cloud-based services, and the increasing need for IT organizations to be more nimble and iterate applications ever faster? If you are a successful serial entrepreneur and MIT trained engineer, like Rajat (Raj) Bhargava, you get JumpCloud. JumpCloud is a Boulder, Colorado-based, start-up company that provides cloud-based server management tools. The company was launched last September at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, and was picked as a finalist among companies deemed to be introducing the most disruptive and game changing technologies of 2013.

Since then Raj and JumpCloud have quickly emerged as one of the leading voices in the growing “DevOps” movement, which aims to make new technologies better, faster and cheaper. The entire movement is aimed at delivering applications and products to market more quickly, by streamlining workflows and integrating internal teams. The automation of administrative tasks like server management and security is also a key tenant of DevOps, freeing developers from tedious but necessary tasks, so that they can focus on business driving innovation.

Rajat (Raj)Bhargava. Founder and CEO, JumpCloud

“JumpCloud started, as all of my companies have started, by looking around the market and thinking about what opportunities are available, what’s working well and what’s not. I saw an opportunity for JumpCloud subsequent to rapidly expanding cloud technology and infrastructure. The ability to manage expanding cloud infrastructure is a key ingredient for the success of any business today. At the same time, we were seeing the rise of the “DevOps” movement, which at a very high level is this new business methodology focused on how a company can iterate on their products much faster in order to better understand and adjust to their customers’ and the market’s needs. As a result, IT needs to be able to be a much faster developer of applications, of technology, of tools, of products, and be able to deliver those to the market more often and in a more rapid fashion. When you put those two very big concepts together, where you’ve got cloud technology enabling organizations to build their infrastructure much faster, and this methodology that is taking advantage of that infrastructure, I think you’ve got a fundamental transformation in business. We want to be a part of that transformation and provide technology that will help organizations leverage that process, so that they can become more productive and ultimately successful,” says Raj.

Raj created JumpCloud to help IT organizations manage and orchestrate their server infrastructure so that they may more effectively adopt the DevOps paradigm. He sees three major tenets of DevOps that are important to understand: One is the rapid iteration of your process. The second key is whether or not you’re going to integrate your teams together. For example, are you going to have your salespeople in the room with your marketing people, with your IT people, asking: What are the most critical things that your customers need? What are they liking? What are they not liking? What’s working in your product? What’s not working? The organization on the IT side is going to take all that information and iterate from there. You’ve got rapid iteration combined with integration across your company. The third major tenant is automation. By automating different tasks that are incredibly important but often tedious, you can truly take advantage of DevOps. You can become much faster. You can become more agile.

What JumpCloud’s trying to do is take advantage of those tenets to help organizations automate their infrastructure. “If they (companies) can automate their infrastructure, then they can move much faster and iterate more rapidly, based on customer feedback. Subsequently companies are going to have more useful iterations to bring to the market. Traditionally IT has been seen as a road block to moving the organization forward – this is not the case in DevOps. The cloud is another example of DevOps oriented agility, where you can spin up servers, you can put out applications, you can move much faster. But just having that raw horsepower of the cloud doesn’t really help you if you don't have a methodology around how to take advantage of it,” says Raj.

The company sees the growth of the DevOps movement as key to its own growth, and is actively promoting its adoption. “We are absolutely evangelizing DevOps as a concept, and people generally seem to understand it pretty quickly. We’ve been a catalyst for a media site called DevOps.com. We’re a co-founding sponsor of the site, which we hope will become the central place where IT and DevOps folks go to learn about the growing movement. The site will host events, and they have papers that they can read, and tons of original content that they can consume. We’re taking a thought leadership role with DevOps in the truest sense,” says Raj.

JumpCloud also created one of the first major conferences on DevOps that was held in Boulder. “As part of our work at JumpCloud, we’re very interested in helping the community understand what DevOps is. We’re trying to be very creative on how to get the word out there that DevOps could be transformative to your business. It could be a huge competitive advantage,” continues Raj.

It is still very early days for JumpCloud, but the opportunity is huge. “The way I frame the size of the market opportunity is that I look at every single server out there – each could or should have JumpCloud on it to help automate the management of that server. There are maybe a billion servers – it’s a very big number, and it’s always growing. Think of the number of new servers being added at RackSpace, AWS, Softlayer and other infrastructure providers every day. We estimate that there’s probably a couple hundred million servers being added just this year, and next year it might even be more than that. It is becoming more and more common to see companies that have more servers than they do people. Their infrastructure is growing faster than their payroll,” says Raj. Very economical, JumpCloud charges per server being managed via its automated platform.

Raj, who only recently turned 40, has already started nearly a dozen tech companies many of which he has taken public, many to acquisition and many which still remain private. Raj began his work as a senior in college, stealing time from the development labs at MIT. It was in those labs that he was able to start his first company NetGenesis, which went public in 2000 and was subsequently acquired. NetGenesis was only the beginning as Raj would go on to found and nurture numerous additional companies, spanning industries from cloud, to security, to server management and beyond.

He is not only a serial entrepreneur, but a concurrent or parallel entrepreneur. “I have three companies that are currently private. There’s JumpCloud, which I founded and am the CEO of. We have a company called MobileDay, which I co-founded and am chairman of, and there’s a company called Yesware in Boston, that I co-founded and am on the board of,” says Raj. He thinks about his start-ups as ways to solve problems, rather than a linear progression of starting up one business, then thinking about what venture might be next. “I’m always trying to think about what might be needed out in the marketplace. And when we come up with a concept that’s really possible, that I think could succeed and is necessary and valuable, then I go through the process of building a business around the idea. I do them in parallel, and over the last 16 or 17 years, I’ve always had a couple of companies going at the same time. I try and focus my attention on problems that I think I can understand and solve, but that are actually going to be meaningful,” continues Raj.

When Raj does come up with an idea, he tries to vet it as quickly as possible. “It becomes a process. The idea gets vetted – often just through conversation, and then you add another layer to it, which is this is what a product might look like, and then, add the other layer, which is a first version of this product, that’s ready for feedback. Somewhere along that spectrum, towards actually having a product, is when I start to think about turning it into a real business. I try and drive the failure rate into the early, idea stage or the mockup stage. Hopefully when we’re spending money on building a product, and devoting time and energy, we already have enough confidence that this is something that’s going to be necessary. If it’s not going to work, it’s better to have spent just a few months on the idea rather than a few years,” says Raj.

Raj does work with major investors for funding many of his businesses, but he also puts his own capital at risk. “I often end up funding through the early stages, myself. I’m not asking others, to take the risk. But then, after it’s something that I believe has a decent shot at becoming a good-sized business, we’ll generally look to raise money. For JumpCloud we’ve raised money from two investors, the Foundry Group and Bullet Time Ventures. The person I am working with at Foundry has been involved in all eight of my companies, as either an investor, a board member or a co-founder. The folks at Bullet Time Ventures have also worked on three of our businesses. Few would argue the value of building good, long term investor relationships, and I think that’s exactly what we’ve done.” says Raj.

Growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Raj wasn’t really exposed to the start-up culture that exists in places like Silicon Valley or Cambridge, Massachusetts. So, you might wonder where he caught the entrepreneur bug? “I went to MIT, and anyone who knows MIT knows that there is entrepreneurship in the drinking water there. MIT has a long history of startups, and I think it is where I really caught the bug. Also, when I was in school, I had an internship every summer at Intel. It was an amazing experience, but I also realized that working at a big company wouldn’t provide me the same opportunities that I would have if I went and did something on my own. I wanted to put myself in a position where my success would be based on whether I was smart enough, good enough and I could execute well enough,” says Raj. In 1994, his senior year at MIT, Raj started his first company, NetGenesis. With this company he would actually introduce ESPN to the Web and build a site that the sports news giant eventually leveraged to show advertisers the value of an Internet presence. The business grew substantially, and Raj was off and running as a serial entrepreneur.

Raj’s track record is proven, but how far can he take JumpCloud? “Our vision is to have our product on every single server and give IT and DevOps pros back tremendous amounts of time. That’s the one resource that DevOps and IT folks have an incredible shortage of. Our goal is to give them time to focus on what they love – innovation – rather than on maintenance and management tasks,” concludes Raj.

Bruce H. Rogers is the coauthor of the recently published book Profitable Brilliance: How Professional Service Firms Become Thought Leaders.